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Hillcrest
Chapel, Norwich

I
was cycling aimlessly around the suburbs of
Norwich, as I am all too often wont to do,
looking for anything interesting which I might be
able to photograph or write about, when I turned
a corner and came across this rather pleasing
little building. I hadn't known it existed, and
all it had been to me was a cross on an Ordnance
Survey map. I was out in the pleasant suburbia of
Thorpe, up in the hilly bit above the river. I
hadn't even heard of Hillcrest Chapel. It is
tucked away on a road to nowhere in particular.
The clean white lines and neatly-kept grounds
denoted a building which is obviously well looked
after, and the notice board of services and other
events showed that it is also a fairly busy one.

The chapel
proudly proclaims itself undenominational.
My first thought was that it was probably a
building of the 1920s, probably given a thorough
going over in the 1970s or 1980s.

However,
looking more closely, I noticed a curiosity. The
dedication panel above the main entrance has been covered
over. Now, this immediately suggested to me that the
building had been erected for a particular denomination,
and no longer served a community of that character.
Perhaps they had been Baptists who had wanted to present
themselves as a less dogmatic congregation. Or,
intriguingly, I wondered if the church had been built as
an Anglican chapel of ease to Thorpe St Andrew down by
the river.

Coming
home and trying to find out about it, the mystery only
deepened. It appeared that the chapel was older than I'd
thought. Intriguingly, in the years before and after the
First World War, the minister here was the Reverend
George Hegart Ramsay. In 1917,
he married into the fabulous wealth of the Coutts-Lindsay
family - his wife's father was the second Baronet Burges.
Did this Scottish family bankroll a rebuilding of
Hillcrest Chapel at that time?

I would be
fascinated to learn more about this church. I'll update
this entry accordingly.